Meaning, Chapter 5

It's interesting the book would mention "Born in the USA" as Regan's campaign song since more recently the same thing happened to McCain. I forget the song (maybe someone can help me out) but during his campaign, McCain used some one's song for his own interpretation and the artist didn't share his view. I have also heard of the "every breath you take" song really being more about stalking than love. These are both very contemporary and valid examples.
The book gets pretty involved in some of the theory behind meaning, but I took away that meaning is very often representational to something in the real world. We live in the real world we need to anchor meaning to something concrete, that's the easy part. However, when we try to give meaning, or rather share our meaning with someone else when discussing something more abstract, that's when different interpretations arise. It becomes very easy to see the same thing and take away completely different meanings as in the TV show example at the end of the chapter illustrates.
My little ones like to play a little joke on me. We pull up to a red stop light and they tell me, "Daddy, red means go, green means stop." Of course they both know full well that this is the inverse of reality, but even at a young age they understand this social code and they understand it so well that they find it ridiculous and humorous to try and fool someone into thinking otherwise. And these codes don't take long to learn. I suppose that is indicative of a social code or else we would have a more difficult time following the rules. Think of the Chinese encyclopedia and how tumultuous that would make our world. No doubt children would adapt faster, but the initial the ill effects would certainly be felt on the young despit their comparatively limited exposure to the codes we employ.